It's official! IBM System Storage TS1120 tape drive takes home the gold award, the product of the year, announced by Storage magazine.

I spent 18 hours traveling from Australia to China yesterday, and we were partially delayed due to weather, but felt that it was necessary to discuss the innovative use of encryption on this drive.

While most consider the TS1120 an "Enterprise-class" tape technology for the mainframe, it is also attachable to the smallest distributed systems running Windows, Linux, or various flavors of UNIX. Rather than limit users with an Encryption Key Manager that only ran on z/OS, IBM instead chose to implement it in Java, that can be run on anything from z/OS to Linux, Unix and Windows platforms, giving clients choice and flexibility in their deployment.

The design is quite clever and elegant. In the encryption world, there are two ways to encrypt.

Symmetric Key

This is very fast, because it uses a single key for both encryption and decryption, and can be incorporated on a chip. The problem is that anyone with the key can read the sensitive data.

Asymmetric Key

This is slower, but more secure, using two separate keys. The public "encryption" key takes clear data and encrypts it. Anyone can be freely given this key, as they cannot use it to decrypt any other data. The private "decryption" key is able to decrypt the data, so that one is kept secret. If two business plan to exchange lots of tapes, they can exchange their "encryption" keys to each other.

So, let's say that Green, Inc. wants to send a tape to Blue, Co. Blue has already provided its public "encryption" key to Green, so Green does the following:

• Generate a unique data key, will call it the "red key", and there is one for each tape. It is a standard AES 256-bit symmetric key that can be processed with less than one percent overhead on the tape drive. All the data is encrypted with this key.
• Store the red key on the tape. How does Green give Blue the red key? Green encrypts it with Blue's RSA 2048-bit public "encryption" key. This is stored on three places on the tape cartridge, one in memory, and the other two on the media itself.
• Sends the tape over to Blue Co.

When it arrives on the dock at Blue Co., they do the following:

• Mount the tape and decrypt the "red key" using Blue's super-secret private decryption key.
• Pass the "red key" to the tape drive, and have it read, append or re-write the tape.

If the super-secret private key is ever compromised, all you have to do is mount the tape, unlock the red key with the old private key, and re-lock the red key with a new public key. Since the red key doesn't change, the rest of the data can be left in tact. The whole process takes less than 5 minutes, compared to Sun Microsystems method, which could take 1-2 hours per cartridge, having to decrypt and re-encrypt the entire data stream.

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